The Architectures of Planetary Well-Being is a podcast exploring the interconnection of our social and ecological systems. Season two, entitled Between Us, is presented by the re:arc institute and KoozArch. Between Us is a series of intimate conversations shared between two critical practitioners operating across architecture, art, curation, illustration, design and literature.

Across generational and geographical space, their discussions will move through shared aspects of practice to reach infinitely larger and more pressing issues, on and around the roles of cultural practice for planetary well-being. These exchanges aim to reflect the need for interdisciplinary conversation and un-siloed imagination, in order to attempt the realisation of a more just, caring, and restorative world.

Full biographies and transcripts for each conversation are available through re:arc institute, while you can access all episodes via major podcasts platforms and also below.

"Architecture of Planetary Well-being" is an audio series curated by KoozArch for re:arc institute and is presented by re:arc and KoozArch Founder Federica Zambeletti and Chief Editor Shumi Bose. All episodes are published on re:arc's website and on Spotify.

Between Us: Introduction

In this first episode, you will hear from Federica Zambeletti and Shumi Bose of KoozArch — curators for this season — together with publisher and researcher Alice Grandoit-Šutka, from re:arc institute. We chose to guide the conversations of Season Two through the lens of betweenness — bridging gaps between practitioners and disciplines; moving collaboratively between spaces, concepts, and worlds. In this conversation, we reflect on the unexpected connections that emerged during the conversations for Between Us, and the generosity and sense of collaboration required to create architectures of planetary well-being.

About

re:arc institute is a non-profit philanthropic association based in Copenhagen (DK) supporting architectures of planetary well-being. Acknowledging the interdependence of our social and ecological systems, the institute nurtures the creative reimagining of current processes and frameworks, and resources the development of community-led solutions that address the root causes and consequences of climate breakdown.

Co-hosts

Federica Sofia Zambeletti is the founder and managing director of KoozArch. She is an architect, researcher and storyteller whose interests lie at the intersection between art, architecture and regenerative practices. In 2022 Federica founded KoozArch with the ambition of creating a space where to research, explore and discuss architecture beyond the limits of its built form. Parallel to her work at KoozArch, Federica is Architect at the architecture studio UNA and researcher at the non-profit agency for change UNLESS where she is project manager of the research "Antarctic Resolution". Federica is an Architectural Association School of Architecture in London alumni.

Shumi Bose is chief editor at KoozArch. She is an educator, curator and editor in the field of architecture and architectural history. Shumi is a Senior Lecturer in architectural history at Central Saint Martins and also teaches at the Royal College of Art, the Architectural Association and the School of Architecture at Syracuse University in London. She has curated widely, including exhibitions at the Venice Biennale of Architecture, the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Royal Institute of British Architects. In 2020 she founded Holdspace, a digital platform for extracurricular discussions in architectural education, and currently serves as trustee for the Architecture Foundation.

Bios

Emanuel Admassu is an artist, architect, and educator. Along with Jen Wood, he is a founding partner of the art and architecture practice AD—WO. He is an Assistant Professor at Columbia GSAPP and a founding board member of the Black Reconstruction Collective. His design, teaching, and research practices operate at the intersection of design theory, spatial justice, and contemporary African art. The work meditates on the international constellation of Afrodiasporic spaces. Admassu’s edited publication Where is Africa? Vol.1 was published in Spring 2024.

Noura Al Sayeh-Holtrop was born in 1983 in Kuwait. She has worked as an architect in major cities around the world. She is currently Advisor for Heritage Projects at the Bahrain Authority for Culture and Antiquities (BACA), where she oversees the planning and implementation of cultural institutions and advises on urban rehabilitation and the creation of public space. In 2010, Noura was the co-curator of Reclaim, Bahrain's first pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale, which was awarded a Golden Lion for best national participation.

Danielle Dean is an interdisciplinary artist whose work explores the geopolitical and material processes that colonise the mind and body. Drawing from the aesthetics and history of advertising, and from her multinational background her work explores the ideological function of technology, architecture, marketing, and media as tools of subjection, oppression, and resistance.

Ekow Eshun is Chairman of the Fourth Plinth, overseeing the foremost public art programme in the UK, and the former Director of the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London. He is the curator of exhibitions including, the ongoing exhibition The Time is Always Now at the National Portrait Gallery in London, as well as In the Black Fantastic at the Hayward Gallery, London and author of books including Black Gold of the Sun, shortlisted for the Orwell prize, and Africa State of Mind, nominated for the Lucie Photo Book Prize.

Federica Fragapane is an independent information designer who specialises in creating projects and data visualisations as a freelancer. Many of her projects take an experimental approach, carefully selecting visual languages to encourage readers to engage with the narratives conveyed by the data. In 2023, three of her data visualisations were acquired by the Museum of Modern Artor MoMA in New York, becoming part of its Permanent Collection.

Samia Henni is an historian, award winning author, educator, and exhibition maker of the built, destroyed, and imagined environments. Her research and teaching address questions of colonisation, wars, extraction, deserts, forced displacement, and gender. Currently, she is an invited visiting professor (2023-24) at the Institute for the History and Theory of Architecture (gta), ETH Zurich, and the co-chair of the University Seminar "Beyond France" at Columbia University. In the Fall of 2024, Samia will join the faculty of McGill University's Peter Guo-hua Fu School of Architecture in Montreal.

Natasha Ginwala is a curator, writer and editor based in Colombo and Berlin. She is co-curator of Sharjah Biennial 16 (2025), Artistic Director of Colomboscope since 2019 and Associate Curator at Large at Gropius Bau, Berlin between 2018 and 2024. Ginwala is a widely published author with a focus on contemporary art, visual culture, and social justice. She has curated numerous exhibitions and biennales around the world over the past decade, and is one of five curators of the forthcoming Sharjah Biennial of Art in 2025.

Sabba Khan is a visual artist, architectural designer and storyteller. Her work examines diasporic identities and how they are formed by the physical and non-physical structures around us. Her work is personal and emotive, and designed to elicit relational empathy, understanding and expansive ideas of a shared sense of humanity. In 2021, Sabba published the graphic novel The Roles We Play.

Lawrence Lek is an artist exploring the myths of technological progress in an age of artificial intelligence. Drawing from traditions of assemblage across architecture, cinema, and sound, Lek employs vernacular media, including video games, electronic music, industrial products, essay films, and digital animation, to develop interconnected worlds that interrogate concepts of AI, its capacity for consciousness, and the emergence of posthuman identity.

Nzinga B Mboup is a Dakar-based Senegalese architect. In 2019, alongsideNicolas Rondet she co-founded Worofila an architectural practice specialised in bioclimatic design and construction using earth and biomaterials sourced locally. In addition to her architectural practice, Nzinga has been a researcher for the African Futures Institute since 2022 and is the invited curator of the CCA ℅ Dakar public programme between 2023–2026.

Setareh Noorani is an architect, researcher and curator at Nieuwe Instituut, and an independent artist. Noorani’s spatial and architectural designs emphasise her ongoing research into (institutional) spaces for collective inhabitation and appropriation, centering unde-rnarrated voices. Setareh’s current (curatorial) research at the Nieuwe Instituut, focuses on the paradigm-shifting notions of decoloniality, feminisms, queer ecologies, non-institutional and collective representations in contemporary architecture, its heritage and future scenarios.

Seetal Solanki is a Materials Translator, founder and Director of Ma-tt-er, a relational practice focused on providing access to materials through creating fluency, understanding migration and putting it all into practice. Seetal is also the author of Why Materials Matter, Responsible Design for a Better World, a tutor on Silva Systems at Design Academy Eindhoven and programmes After School Clubs at STORE STORE.

Sumayya Vally is founder and Principal of the award-winning design, research and pedagogical practice Counterspace searching for expression for hybrid identities and territory, particularly for African and Islamic conditions — both rooted and diasporic. Her design process is often forensic, and draws on the aural, performance and the overlooked as generative places of history and work. Sumayya was the Artistic Director of the inaugural Islamic Arts Biennale in Jeddah in 2023, and in 2021, was the youngest ever architect to design the Serpentine Pavilion in London.

Leah Wulfman is a self-titled Carrier Bag architect, educator, game designer, digital puppeteer, and occasional writer. Trained as an architect, Wulfman has been assembling hybrid virtual and physical spaces in order to prototype new relationships to technology and nature, as well as challenge normative ideologies so often reinforced by technology and architecture. In addition to mixed reality installations that play with and emphasise the physical, material basis of everything digital, they are presently working on a research series focusing on gamified environments, interactions and materials.